How did you first start suspecting you were ASD? (New here!)

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Hello everyone!

I started lurking on this website due to meeting a possible romantic interest who, as I got to know him better, seemed like he might be on the autism spectrum. Prior to this friendship/relationship, I didn't know much about ASD except for pretty superficial portrayals of it in the media (e.g. Heather Kuzmich on ANTM, which I'm obsessed with). I also knew that my mother has often vocalized suspicions that my father has Asperger's, although I mostly interpreted that as her intending to insult him. Anyway, that little knowledge + things the new guy had done, what he told me about himself, etc was enough to get me thinking about ASD. Now I can't stop reading this forum. I've been doing a lot of independent research both here and elsewhere, and it's been really helpful in my efforts to try to understand him.

However… Once I got past the initial recognition of "Wow, these descriptions of ASD symptoms are eerily accurate and applicable to him!" and feeling pleased when he subsequently confirmed to me that he was diagnosed as a kid, I'm now feeling more and more startled by how well some of these descriptions suit me, too. Especially when I think back to my childhood, it's kind of frightening to apply this interpretive lens to some of my quirks (past and present) that never really made sense to me. Things start to fall into place a bit. I also took the Aspie Quiz out of curiosity and this was my score:

"Your Aspie score: 149 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 66 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie"

OK, so, at this point I'm *really* concerned that there's some sort of confirmation bias (and/or hypochondria) at work--I've never suspected that I was ASD at all before, I'm not a doctor, and these symptoms could all be in my head or have totally different explanations. I consider myself a fairly social person now, so on some levels it might seem ridiculous to wonder whether I am ASD. At the same time, I know that I am extremely different now from how I was from ages 0 to ~21 or so, and it has taken a lot of hard work for me to learn how to make friends and build relationships. I'm still not very good at it, actually, but I think I've gotten better at identifying people who value my weirdness and interpret my quirks as part of a cool, confident, "artistic" persona.

In addition to the fact that I'm seeking out different people, I think the biggest reason people respond more positively to me now is because I'm more conventionally (physically) attractive now than ever before in my life. In the past, I was bullied to an absurd degree and felt myself to be very isolated and unpopular. If I'm being honest, I never had more than a handful of friends and I never dated at all until the past 3 years or so. Both appearance-wise and personality-wise, I've adapted to the point where I'm indistinguishable from my childhood self. And social quirks aside, there are many other ASD symptoms that I recognize in myself--again, things that never made sense to me before, or things that I didn't even know to be "abnormal" until now. It all seems like something I should think more about, but I have no idea where to go from here. I feel so overwhelmed. I'm not even sure if this post is at all coherent.

My question(s) to you all: if you were diagnosed later in life, or are self-diagnosed, what first sparked your curiosity about ASD or made you suspect that you were somewhere on the spectrum? What makes you feel comfortable identifying that way even without an official diagnosis (if that's your situation)? Are quizzes like the one above truly helpful, or is it likely that they'll only make things more confusing for me? Above all, do y'all have any advice for what I should do now? Is it important to have a diagnosis?

So many questions, but I'd be really grateful to hear anyone's thoughts. I have tons of work to do today but I can't seem to focus on anything else but this right now.

A good friend of mine was diagnosed with Aspergers. I ended up learning little bits here and there, and they invited me to join this Autism group that met up every other week or something. I started seeing the symptoms in myself more and more.
It took a year or 2 for me to finally pluck up the (impulsive) courage to book an appointment with my GP to ask where to go from there.

I've been repeating this story a few times, but I'm new to the diagnosis myself, so I'm learning about myself.

My mom told me, "Yeah, they would have tried to diagnose you with Asperger's. It was such a fad." She pulled me out of school that year.

I'm still pissed at her. I could have known much earlier, could have got started on figuring things out. But no, she had to insist that her daughter was too smart to have a disability. Guess what, Mom? I'm disabled. Deal with it.

Hey welcome!
So, I don't have a diagnosis yet but I am already setting an appointment with an expert for may.
First I bought the highly sensitive person book by Aron and thought it explained my quirkiness and loved it. But around 15% of the population according to the author is highly sensitive and I started to look around and spot the real highly sensitive people and even asking them the questions to know if they are or not and came to the conclusion I was not like them and that it actually didn't explain, well, everything else besides sensory processing issues and having meltdowns. I was left at dark.
Then everything happened as a coincidence. Last year I met two people with diagnosed aspergers: a severely affected girl from my japanese course and a college professor. I met first the girl and started to identify myself with her traits, despite to a much lesser extent because her case is severe. It was very surprising really! At first I thought it was some kind of realtion between highly sensistive and aspie.
Then I met the professor. Even before we knew he had aspergers, my friends were already saying I was like him with same kind of quirkiness and traits and the way of thinking. After we discovered what it was my friend asked me: "are you sure you don't have aspergers?" she was kind of kidding as she said so laughing, but it striked me. what if?
I started doing lots and lots of research and everything started to make sense. Like, everything. I did the online tests too and got high scores, and asked my sister to do the RAAD-S for me without saying what it was and I got a score of 132! (more than 65 - aspie without any false positives in the large testing sample). I didn't tell her yet and she doesn't know what aspergers is, but I have the impression she won't be much surprised since she has always said I am a mixture of Brick Heck (from The Middle) and Temperance Brennan (from Bones) and she has always complained A LOT of my rigidity (specially but not exclusively when we go out and she suddenly want to go somewhere else), talking about the saaaame topic nonstop all the time (usually something I discovered about behaviour or a cartoon like frozen), for not paying attention to what she is saying when I am doing something else, for being "annoying" about choosing food (for instance I don't eat when some kinds of food touch another) and things like that she complains a lot and we aspies are the obsessed ones
My advice: keep on doing research on the topic, and if you feel like you really have it, go for an evaluation! You may ask them not to give you an official diagnosis but at least you will have answers for your doubts and help with things we usually struggle with like executive disfunction.

I didn't, and to be honest I probably wouldn't have, if it wasn't pointed out to me.

Mine is quite atypical. I started wondering after playing this wonderful video game, To the Moon, which features two autistic characters, who are portrayed in a beautiful, realistic and non-discriminative way.

I could not directly relate to the characters, but I would say it made me wonder. Before that I did not have a "caricatural" vision of autistic people since a colleague of mine used to work with autistic persons and we had discussed it many times, but still I thought being autistic was much more apparent and I had no idea the diagnosis could be so complicated. In that game... some traits did fit and I thought that if autistic people could look like this I could as well be one.

And then I start to use google, to read posts here and documents from other places, and some books, and a few weeks later I was at the same time smiling because I had finally found out why I was weird (and the answer was not that I was crazy, selfish or hopelessly retarded in some areas) and crying because I understood things would never be easy for me. A few months later I got a diagnosis from an NHS psychologist.

I sent an e-mail to the game author to thank him. He did not answer, but according to the game's forum there is at least one other person with a similar history.

(Note: To the Moon is really excellent. It is not really a game, more some sort of graphical novel put in the form of a game, and it is very short (a few hours) but I really recommend it to everyone. It is just a powerful narrative about death, regrets, love, Aspergers and yes, the moon, full of geek references, and with a beautiful soundtrack. You really don't have to be a gamer to like it. But be warned that it is a very sad story (not because of autism, it is just that the story is really sad), it is the first fiction work to make me cry for years (except some books). So play it only when you feel good )

I first noticed it in a movie about low functioning autistic children.
Many of their symtoms were similar to mine (though far less severe in my case) & I felt like I really understood their reactions & behaviors.
About a year later I was seeing a psychologist following a really nasty meltdown at age 20 that got me kicked off campus for a semester.
I mentioned to her in one of our sessions about the movie and the autistic kids and that it seemed to me like whatever was going on with me was the same thing them, just not quite as intense.
She officially diagnosed me with Asperger's Syndrome a while later.
I'd never heard of it, but I was relieved that I wasn't the only one.
I'd also already come up with my own version of the 'Intense World' theory to explain what was going on with me, and I was both surprised & gratified to see that it's recently gained some significant scientific credibility.
Hope that answers your question.

No idea what to tell you other than this:
Generally speaking if a condition doesn't significantly impair your day to day functioning, it doesn't qualify for a clinical diagnosis, no matter how weirdly your brain is wired or how out of balance your chemicals are.
So, if you feel you have ASD symptoms that are interfering with your ability to function on a day to day basis, go get yourself a diagnosis one way or another.
Otherwise, it's probably not that important because even you are an aspie it's not really causing you any significant problems so what good would a diagnosis do you?

I first suspected when I was a kid and started reading through the psychology section of my high school library around 15.

Autism started cropping up in the books I was reading. At first I paid no attention to it since I had no idea what autism was and it was barely a side note. Then I stumbled upon the book Son Rise. (Amazing, beautiful book BTW) I still didn't realize I had found my answer, unlike the child in that books I was able to function in and interact with the world. But it still spoke to me, I felt like I understood that child better than I'd ever understood anyone.

I started reading everything I could about autism, though there wasn't much in the second hand books in my highschool library. Asperger's hadn't even been identified in the US yet. And much of what I read wasn't happy. But even then I began to wonder.

Then I found a book with a list of diagnostic criteria. While none were strong enough to be truly crippling I could check every box. I remember reading that list over and over. Wondering if you could be mildly autistic. Though I knew the answer then, even if it was still a year or two from having a name.

I kept it to myself for years. For a long time I refused to believe it. I had two key differences that according to the books I couldn't have if I were autistic, I had empathy and an imagination. But now we realize how wrong the experts were in that regard, don't we?

Was listening to a radio show about mental health, they talked for a bit on Aspergers and everything they said about it I would think 'what rubbish, that is how I behave' until I realised I had it wrong and that actually it could be my behavior that isn't quite right. Had obv heard of Aspergers and ASD before but didn't know the detail, looked it up and WHAMMO, it was like reading something that described me.

Two years ago, I tried a job-personality test on the net, and it came out: Aspie!
I was only a bit surprised. From the first time, I ever heard about autism, I thought, that there was something vaguely familiar about it... and yet...? I had also suspected a possible mini-micro brain damage from my difficult birth.
My therapists have mentioned autistic traits before.
By the way, I was very unhappy about having been given a personality disorder,(which my psychologist don´t see) and critisized for being self absorbed, having bad communication skills, unstable eye-contact and for rambling.

A short time later, my neighbour and friend winked at me and said, "Aspie", teasing me about my being literal.
I went on the net and found the danish Asperger Club. The leader told me to do some research and come back. In the mean time, I got an informal dx on JustAsk. I called the leader of the AS club again and told him, what I had found about my traits, and he said BINGO!
So, I joined WP and AS Club and at last, after being sacked from a work trial with the words: "You don´t understand a hoot of what is going on around you. You can´t read between the lines and you mess up when we´re busy!", I asked my doc for a referral to an AS expert.
Here I am, - still reading about it and analyzing bits and pieces.

Being dxéd has done wonders for me: I have a new self understanding, I have been able to dismiss all the strange dxés, I have been given over time, which had made me depressed and very insecure, - even of my own thoughts.
I don´t feel bad for not handeling the social aspects of an ordinary work well anymore, because I know, that I can improve by being aware of my way of functioning.

I always knew I was very different but thought of it as my personality. In the late 1990s I was told by a boss that I had a little bit of autism. I thought it was a very inappropriate thing for an employer to say to an employee. I was very confused as to why he said this. Was it bullying? Was it nitpicking? Later on he said I was not making eye contact and people might think I was being rude. I did not know I was not making eye contact and that people cared about that. Since his name was on my paycheck and I knew with my age and "personality" that finding another job was problematic I went along with the bullying/nitpicking. I thought why does here care so much about something so trivial as eye contact? I have to admit even though it was an inelegant and possibly inappropriate way of teaching I am much better at eye contact because of him.

Later on I was watching a few episodes of Bones I noticed that Temperance Brennen's and Zack's personalities and thought patterns were like mine (writing this I just realized that the way Booth keeps on correcting her was similar to what my old boss did). I was curious enough to read a few articles about her. Aspergers was mentioned so I read a few articles about Aspergers and it did fit fit me. I though to myself "Oh that's interesting" but that is as far as it went. My curiosity was satisfied. There was no epiphany, no OMG everything in my life now makes sense. It would take an intervention by my siblings last year for diagnosis, epiphany, identity.